The present invention relates generally to the design and construction of an optical disk autoloader and copier and can be used on CD, VCD, DVD and any other formats of audio/video and computer IT (information technology) disks.
The optical disk, including the format of CD, VCD, DVD, has been a popular data storage and exchange media of today. From film industry to small business, high volume disk duplication with minimal manpower is on demand. Using a robot arm to automatically load blank writable disks to optical record drives and pickup the formalized disk out is one of the solutions.
Today, we are facing the reality that the different types of optical disks on the market have increased substantially. The original compact disk (CD) were diversified to CD Audio, CD-Graphics, CD-Text, CD-Extra, CD-ROM, CD-ROM XA, CD-I, Video CD, Photo CD, CD-I Bridge, etc. Currently, the new Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) technology has matured as a high capacity CD-size disc for video, multimedia, games and audio application. More complicated diversity has come into the horizon, e.g. DVD-ROM, DVD-Audio, DVD-Video, DVD-RAW, DVD-RW, DVD-R, and hybrid formats DVDplus. In the future, Blu-ray and HD DVD will no doubt create more uncertainty and diversity to the optical disk marketing. Besides the digital optical storing formats, the physical size and coating of the optical disks are also subject to other variations: mini-cd modifies the standard 12 cm CD size to a business card size or even smaller, and the shape of optical disks may not be a circle but a rectangle, a heart shape or any number of prototypes being worked on.
In today's commercial autoloader design, the robot arm only follow a fixed motion plan dedicated from factory-preset configuration; it can not be easily modified, maintained and updated by end users to respond and correspond to the changes brought about by the fast-paced-technical developments and ever-changing diverse optical data storage formats. For example, to reduce cost, space or other considerations, more and more models of optical drives has short tray or no tray, and can not be used with the present autoloader systems; the arm can not grab some min CD with specific size and shape; only a limited optical disk format can be recognized and duplicated; the on-site maintenance, repair and update capabilities are limited, or are translated into very costly proposition because of the limitation.
Furthermore, almost all the available disk copier systems in the market today uses stepper motors or servo motions, which is a form of digital motion actuator coupled with the use of a external computer. Although the incorporation of stepper/servo motors and external computers eases the construction of a disk copier system, it comes at the expense of reduced flexibility in adjusting to robotic arm movement. Such is the case as evidenced by the prior art of Lee et al. U.S. Pat. No. 5,914,918, Miller U.S. Pat. No. 6,141,298, Miller U.S. Pat. No. 6,208,612, Miller U.S. Pat. No. 6,532,198, and Miller U.S. Pat. No. 6,822,932.
Though users in this industry are starting to feel the problem, nothing is done to remediate the problem that the mixed functionality of present day autoloader design without distinctively separating out the functions (robot arm motion control, duplication, monitoring/sensing/feedback, and user interface, for example), the challenges and difficulties will continue to rise.
With the increasing demands on technology and complexity of software and mechanical systems, the reuse of software and mechanical components is becoming more and more important and a key factor in software and mechanical development practice.
Moreover, components are useful fragments of a system that can be assembled with other fragments to form larger pieces or complete applications. Hence, system should be developed by composing available components, and evolve by updating components replacing them with newer versions.
Indeed, in the autoloader duplication system, the better mechanism should be the module/component basis as proposed and claimed by present invention, resulting in re-usable components/modules and minimum component need to be replaced or modified or combined to build, and to satisfy the requirement of ever-changing diversity in the duplication machines market.
This invention uses modularization construction which is the key solution for improving the flexibility and comprehensibility of a system. A module in this invention can be either hardware (mechanical), or software (programming logic implemented with appropriate programming tools of choice), or combination of hardware/software forming a particular functional unit.
Although some prior art patents, such as Drynkin et al. U.S. Pat. No. 6,636,426 disclosed and claimed the use of DC motors having sensor feedback, Drynkin completely differs from present invention in that it lacks the modularization construction, either in the sense of physical hardware functional unit, or in the sense of software control modules, of present invention.
The modification for one module will not affect others. An end user can select a specific module combination to realize his application with minimum cost.
Most optical disk copiers today need to be hooked up with computers. Their operations are complicated, as a result. Present invention envisions the design and construction of an optical disk copier/loader to be a stand-alone system with easy user interface.
Moreover, most optical disk copiers come with factory pre-configured operation setting and thus do not contain modular design to allow, for example, the possibility of reconfiguration due to new type of writers/drives being put in place.